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We can get a handle on how much storage needed by optimization based on real weather data, minimizing costs based on various assumptions on cost of wind, solar, batteries, and long term storage. This web site lets you do that to obtain "synthetic baseload", the equivalent of what a nuclear plant could provide:

https://model.energy/

If we do this for Germany with 2030 cost assumptions and 2011 weather data, 6 hours of batteries are needed and 289 hours of hydrogen storage. Hydrogen storage is quite cheap, if nowhere near as efficient. It's very useful here, reducing the optimal cost by nearly a factor of 2.

For the US as a whole, the optimum solution uses 6 hours of batteries again, but 106 hours of hydrogen. For just Texas, 2 hours of batteries and 254 hours of hydrogen. California alone is 16 hours of batteries and 70 hours of hydrogen (likely due to wind optimizing to zero under those assumptions.)

I plugged this in with existing storage technologies and existing energy demand for just the USA (500 GW). It turns out we'll only need... 6,000 GWH of battery storage!

https://imgur.com/TGRMOBw

By comparison, the entire world only produces ~400 GWh of batteries each year. So it'd only take a decade and a half of global battery production to satisfy the storage demands of just the USA. The rest of the world would be left with zero EV or electronics production for a decade and a half and no grid storage to show for it.

Thanks for the site: it's a good tool to demonstrate just how unfeasible energy storage really is.

Obviously production would have to be scaled up. It's dishonest to present this as some sort of insurmountable barrier, for all potential battery chemistries or other storage modes.

Batteries are not transistors. Their input costs are skyrocketing, and sure enough the end costs of batteries are now starting to rise, too [1]. It's dishonest to pretend that continued exponential growth is guaranteed.

The cost of an automobile shrank from a million dollars inflation adjusted to a hundred thousand over the course of the 1900s. Assembly line manufacturing continued to shrink this down to $10,000 by 1920. Would it be safe to assume that a car would cost $1 by the end of the century given the past rate of a 10x drop in price every two decades?

The reality is that most products are not transistors. They don't get better when you make them smaller. A car will always contain a certain mass of metal, and will not cheaper than the cost of that input. Manufacturing already accounts for under a quarter of a battery's cost. The rest is dominated by cathode and anode material [2]. Battery manufacturing had already become a resource extraction problem.

1. https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...

2. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

You could not be more wrong about batteries. You made a huge error about the cost percentage that lithium makes up. It’s possible — just possible — that other people have researched batteries too, and maybe they have a better sense of where the industry is going.

It makes no sense to assume that we’ve reached “peak battery”, at all.

Continuing this argument is pointless, and really does seem like you’re choosing to ignore reality. I’m done with this conversation.

> You made a huge error about the cost percentage that lithium makes up.

Care to explain? I'm always intrigued by commenters asserting that an error has been made, yet neglect to explain the error.

I already responded to you elsewhere. Perhaps you ignored it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34460846

Cathodes are not a giant chunk of elemental lithium, as you believe.

But lithium still dominates the cost of the cathode. Iron is not the main driver of battery expenses.

13% is not 50%. It makes a huge difference in the cost scaling under discussion.

In fact, nickel dominates the cost of the cathode, in case you missed what I had posted. But there are nickel-free chemistries out there.

And for those nickel-free battery chemistries, what inputs are the main cost drivers? And as per my response, nickel is also experiencing shortages and cost spikes.

My core assertion remains true regardless of the fact that different chemistries require different inputs: battery production has become a resource extraction problem, rather than a manufacturing problem. Unless we find a way to somehow make mining exponentially more efficient, we're not going to be seeing exponential growth in battery production.

Your core assertion remains false because (1) lithium is not the only battery chemistry, and (2) batteries are not the only, or even cheapest, storage technology.

CAT-L, the biggest battery maker in the world, is today ramping up sodium battery production capacity. Will you now insist on a sodium supply bottleneck?

Lithium is the only viable battery chemistry we have presently. Lead acid decays after 100-200 cycles. Who knows if sodium will be viable, it'd be a lot better to argue for its efficacy when it's actually on the market.

The other forms of storage have other shortcomings: hydroelectric storage is geographically dependent. Most of the other form of storage people are mentioning in this tread have never been operated outside of prototypes: like hydrogen electrolysis or compressed air. Again, technological feasibility and market viability are two vastly different things. If compressed air storage works, but it's more expensive than nuclear power what's the point?

Lithium is not, in fact, the only viable battery chemistry. CAT-L, the world's largest maker of batteries, is today ramping up production of sodium batteries. Numerous other chemistries are also being fielded, at $billions scale.

Pumped hydro storage is not, in fact, geographically dependent: there are a lot of hills (which you knew). Compressed air is used in production (which you knew). Hydrogen electrolysis is operated in the millions of tons (which you knew).

Relying on falsehoods is a strange way to argue. It depends on your audience remaining ignorant.

And then there are various thermal storage schemes. Pumped thermal (reversible thermal cycle with hot and cold storage) could have up to a 75% round trip efficiency with cheap materials and no geographical restrictions.

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4994054

And has anyone actually built an electrical thermal storage system - not district heating - with 75% round trip efficiency? Or is this just more marketing hype?

I don't care about company hype and marketing. Get back to me when I can actually buy a sodium battery and throw it on a test load to see if it's living up to the promises. It's not available yet, that's the reality. Tech that's 5 years away has a nasty habit of staying 5 years a way for a lot longer than that.

I got a real kick when you insisted hydroelectricity storage is not geographically dependent and immediate followed by saying it needs hills. And it requires more than just hills. It needs a hill, with a reservoir on top, and another reservoir at the base of the hill to collect the water, and another body of water to fill said reservoirs. The conditions for hydroelectric storage are way more specific than "it needs a hill".

I agree, relying on falsehoods are a bad way to argue. That's why it's bad to insist that storage is an easy problem to solve to try and make the case for intermittent sources.

And a nuke plant needs an unused containment vessel.

Betting that the biggest battery manufacturer in the world will default on billions of dollars in orders for sodium batteries, next quarter, would be a courageous position to take. But I doubt you are shorting CAT-L.

> Get back to me when I can actually buy a sodium battery and throw it on a test load to see if it's living up to the promises.

Sure, right after you get back to to inform us about the approved and operating permanent nuclear waste storage facility in the US with all the waste waiting in temporary holding facilities having been placed there.

We already have it. Yucca mountain was built and could receive waste, but Congress blocked it legislatively.

Yucca mountain is, in fact, not an "approved and operating permanent nuclear waste storage facility in the US with all the waste waiting in temporary holding facilities having been placed there". It is not even "approved and operating".

It's ready to receive waste, it's just political grandstanding withholding approval. It would also be a waste to seal up non-reprocessed fuel since it's a future source of fissile material. Regardless, nuclear waste is a non-issue entirely. We disposable of chemicals far more toxic that never decay all the time, but people get their arms worked up over the word "nuclear".

> Thanks for the site: it's a good tool to demonstrate just how unfeasible energy storage really is.

It’s amazing how clearly you can see the trees without realizing there’s a forest.

Battery production capacity has been scaling like crazy and will continue to scale like crazy: https://www.woodmac.com/press-releases/global-lithium-ion-ba...

It doesn’t matter if battery prices increase some, as you have made that the cornerstone of your argument. Many many comments ago, I linked to the Hornsdale battery. Based on the revenue, you can do the math: the batteries could cost a lot more, and it would still have been profitable. Batteries also don’t make up the entire cost of grid scale storage: the inverters, the transformers, even the cabinets and control computers cost money.

As it is, mining is a lagging indicator. Once mining scales up, the cost of the commodities will naturally go back down. While there is profit to be made, too many people will open mines, which will bring the profitability back down to earth. It’s a tale as old as supply chains.

This same inability to imagine how quickly solar and wind would drop in price led to numerous “experts” making absurd claims about solar and wind being economically infeasible at any scale. The battery supply chain is scaling. There will be price volatility, but the volume is growing by leaps and bounds.

It will take years for the world to transition, but it also takes years to build and install the necessary wind and solar. Battery production won’t remain constant, and it won’t even increase slightly. It has and will increase drastically.

Predictions and actual capability are two vastly different things. Outside the realm of predictions, back here in reality, battery costs are actually increasing rather than declining [1].

"Just scale up mining" is easier said than done. Steel is a widely used commodity. If we could "just scale up mining" and exponentially decrease the cost of materials, why haven't we been able to do this with steel? Care you explain why "just scale up mining" will work for lithium when it hasn't for plenty of other commodities?

1. https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-...

I said prices would be volatile. Scaling has worked for plenty of other commodities. As I said, I’m out.

> Scaling has worked for plenty of other commodities.

Besides transistors and other electronics, which commodities have seen consistent exponential growth relative to cost?

That’s an irrelevant question. I hate that I’m still bothering to respond when you don’t seem interested in changing your position.

There is a fixed cost to extract a kilogram of lithium using a given method. When demand spikes, lithium suppliers will charge more and reinvest those profits into increasing mining capacity. If they had their way, they’d keep prices high, but anyone can open a lithium mine. Lithium is not hard to find. Those people will undercut the previous miner in order to attract buyers, which will force all miners to lower prices back to reality.

As long as prices are high, more and more mines will open as it is suddenly an attractive resource to mine. This will happen until prices start to drop to some percentage-over-cost where things stop being attractive, and the market reaches equilibrium again.

If lithium was profitable to mine for $X/kg for many years, then that is the price it will naturally return to. It is a commodity. There is no special value for getting your lithium from Corporation X or Corporation Y. The only value is the material.

That’s how commodities work. The price is determined by how hard it is to extract, and whether demand has recently spiked (or subsided). Gold is expensive because it

If this were some rare substance, extraction difficulty would increase noticeably with time, but we’re a long way from a shortage of ways to mine lithium. Some ways might be more expensive, so those mines will only open if the prices stay high, but the prices won’t rise indefinitely this century. That is such an illogical assumption. Perhaps the natural price of high volume lithium production is higher than we have today because those more expensive methods are convenient, but it won’t be enough of a price increase to matter in the grand scheme of things, and this assumption of a higher price is a pretty flimsy one to base predictions on even then.

Eventually, as batteries age, they will be recycled, and the need for lithium mining will likely drop sharply, bankrupting some of these mines until production and (profitable) demand are matched again.

Higher prices would indeed incentivize increased demand. But again, this requires higher prices. Understand that renewable activists are predicting that lithium battery production will not only increase exponentially, it will also exponentially drop in cost per KWh as this happens.

This is not going to happen because, as you point out, lithium mining will only expand if prices climb higher to make otherwise unprofitable reserves profitable. And since raw materials now dominate the cost of batteries, this is going to increase the cost of batteries. There's no having your cake and eating it too: in order to increase lithium mining capacity, battery cost is going to have to grow, not shrink.

You edited your post after I replied, so I'll have to edit in response:

There's no one "difficulty of extraction" factor for each commodity. The reality is that there's a diverse variety of reserves all of which are easier or harder to exploit, even for the same commodity. "The price is determined by how hard it is to extract" is at best a huge simplification.

Higher commodity prices make it viable to extract the more inaccessible reserves, but those reserves will only be profitable so long as prices remain high.

> If lithium was profitable to mine for $X/kg for many years, then that is the price it will naturally return to.

Nope! This is completely wrong. Commodities don't "naturally return" to any price. Prices is a result of supply and demand. It could be we find some other battery chemistry that blows lithium out of the water. In that case the cost of lithium will probably collapse well below $X/kg. Conversely, if countries start to try and provision significant amounts of grid battery storage, the costs will grow even higher as more and more inaccessible reserves need to be exploited to supply market demand.

There is no "natural" price of commodities, whatsoever. If the demand for lithium is going to rise and keep rising, then the cost will rise and keep rising unless some breakthrough makes it way more efficient to mine. Given the fact that we've been mining for centuries and we have huge demand for minerals other than lithium, I'm not optimistic on a 100x improvement in mining efficiency.

The prices have gone up, so mining is expanding. There’s a clear next step to the way commodities work. That next step is not for prices to continue increasing dramatically, things should level off and eventually return to normal, as I explained.

> Understand that renewable activists are predicting that lithium battery production will not only increase exponentially, it will also exponentially drop in cost per KWh as this happens.

Battery prices don’t need to keep dropping for them to take over the world. They’re already cheap. Of course people would love for the prices to drop, and they have historically been dropping slowly, but the basic elements will cost a certain amount, so there is a price floor. I don’t know where that is, but it is lower than we’ve seen, because every step in the battery production chain has been making a profit up to this point, including the miners.

The fact that prices have increased only indicates a mismatch between supply and demand, not that the natural price needs to be this high, or that it needs to continue rising. As I pointed out, everyone was already profitable at a lower battery price than what we have today. If batteries are expensive because of lithium, more lithium mines will open and drop the price. If batteries are expensive because the battery makers are price gouging, someone else will undercut them.

The main concern for something like this is market distortion by patents. If the best way to make batteries is locked behind a patent, that can cause prices to be unnaturally high. This concern does not apply to elemental lithium.

> Higher commodity prices make it viable to extract the more inaccessible reserves, but those reserves will only be profitable so long as prices remain high.

You’re practically quoting my comment to me. I addressed that. It is possible that the price will settle higher than it is today if those methods play a big role, but it won’t matter. You don’t seem to appreciate how insanely cost effective batteries already are today. A modest price increase is fine, but it is still illogical to assume prices will stay high. Lithium is not hard to find. Why would the market settle on expensive extraction methods? It is a strange assumption to start from. We’re not talking about something that’s rare.

Either way, the outcome is unchanged unless batteries increase in price exponentially, as your earlier comments apparently assumed.

For the second time, there is no "natural price". You need to iron this kind of wishful thinking out of your head. Companies want to buy more and more lithium, so unless you've got some breakthrough that makes mining a heck of a lot cheaper the cost will keep going up and up as more and more inaccessible reserves need to be exploited. If I have a reserve that costs $4/kg to operate when the price is $5/kg and another reserve that costs $7/kg, I may open the latter if the price rises to $8/kg. But if the price drops back down to $5/kg it's unprofitable to operate.

Here's a way to articulate this that might better mesh with your mental model. The "natural price" of a commodity isn't static. If demand increases and the only way to meet demand is to use more and more expensive mining operations, then this raises the "natural price". As per the above example, the "natural price" rose to $8. It won't drop back below $8/kg unless either we find a way to make mining cheaper, or demand drops back to levels that can be satisfied by my cheaper-to-operate reserve.

You have too many assumptions about the availability of lithium, and lack of “easy” reserves. That’s the fundamental disconnect here. Lithium is not inaccesible, and it is super common. The “hard” ways to mine lithium aren’t that hard.

We’re not talking about gold or platinum, where your discussion points would be relevant.

I’m not wishing over here. But anyways, I’ve tried to explain the reason why the market disagrees with you, and why people are rapidly seeking to integrate batteries into the grid and into cars, which would not be possible if you were correct about lithium becoming insanely expensive.

Battery production will keep scaling at a huge rate, and the prices will be fine. A modest price increase is irrelevant to anything discussed here today.

Lithium is far from easy to extract. It also needs to be refined on-site because its raw form is too low-density to economically transport. So most lithium mines require large amounts of water to fill brine pools. The number of sites that are actually viable to produce lithium are not nearly so common.

Again, the market disagrees with you not me. Lithium commodity prices are rising, and so are battery prices. People are indeed seeking to integrate batteries into the grid - I'm not disputing that. I'm pointing out that these batteries are actually becoming more expensive [1], not less and it's unlikely this trend will reverse on a dime.

1. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/new-york-battery-storage-co...

Commodity prices are rising… causing more mines to open… causing more supply… which will cause prices to drop. Why do you keep pointing to that? Your argument makes no sense. That’s how commodities scale.

> Commodity prices are rising… causing more mines to open…

Yes.

> causing more supply…

Yes

> which will cause prices to drop.

Nope! Remember, the expanded supply is only profitable to operate at higher prices. So the price will drop if demand drops and then supplier will operate the more efficient extraction sites. But if demand stays high, so will prices.

You should be linking to evidence that prices will rise uncontrollably if you want to support your argument that battery production won't keep increasing.

I will remind you that this is your absurd argument:

> By comparison, the entire world only produces ~400 GWh of batteries each year. So it'd only take a decade and a half of global battery production to satisfy the storage demands of just the USA. The rest of the world would be left with zero EV or electronics production for a decade and a half and no grid storage to show for it.

> Thanks for the site: it's a good tool to demonstrate just how unfeasible energy storage really is.

Which is totally different from "battery prices might increase a little", which I have repeatedly indicated is not a problem, and I even pointed out that it is a possibility a long time upthread from here.

Again we're talking about 6,000 GWh of grid storage for just one country. And that's also competing with batteries for EVs, and batteries for electronics. That site estimate's for storage necessity are also pretty optimistic. Most estimates for a completely decarbonized grid - not using peaker gas plants - call for weeks of storage not days: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...

And again, battery production is scaling like crazy. That is an undeniable fact for now. You're the one speculating that it will suddenly stop, and you have presented flimsy evidence at best. Your entire argument falls apart if batteries continue scaling at a reasonable price.

> Your entire argument falls apart if batteries continue scaling at a reasonable price.

If

The only logical choice is to assume that the battery industry will keep doing what it has been doing, unless you present some strong evidence to the contrary, which you have repeatedly failed to do, as has been pointed out by myself and others. The commodities are behaving as expected, which is to say that they're rising in the face of new demand, since supply hasn't had time to catch up.

You're proposing that the sky is falling, but it looks just fine to the rest of us.

I'd check out something like oil which is a large and high dollar market.

The relationship between production and price is well established, and no, production does not move inversely to price. This is because the marginal cost in almost any of these areas is higher per unit of production as production increases. That also of course makes sense logically.

Gold as well, same thing. You start by grabbing gold nuggets of the ground. The effort to mine more gold has not gotten easier, it's gotten harder over time.

I already addressed all of this with the difficulty of extraction. I even called out gold earlier in the thread, possibly more than once.

The abundance of lithium is nothing like the abundance of gold, and oil is a different subject altogether because we have extracted a truly staggering amount of it, and then burned it. We’ve extracted something like 135 billion tons of oil, and a “mere” 250 thousand tons of gold. So, hundreds of thousands of times more oil than gold has been extracted.

Lithium is about 20ppm (parts per million) in the Earth’s crust. Gold is about 0.001ppm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

Lithium is 20 thousand times more abundant than gold, roughly.

Lithium is reusable, analogous to how we handle aluminum. As demand is ramping up, we will need to ramp up extraction, but we’re not throwing it away, and eventually we will get a lot of our lithium from recycling.

It's interesting because coder is very locked into their view on one price.

I don't know lithium at all, but if you follow natural gas / fracking / oil production the question of what reserves are economically recoverable is HIGHLY price dependent (and highly variable). On low end $10-15/barrel cost of production or better. The only reason we have any production in the US is because oil costs more. If you said we would double oil usage prices would spike incredibly.

Same thing with solar net metering, Solar activists demand that soler gen (often during periods with solar curtailments already in effect) be reimbursed based on the same cost as electric rates during the evening (usually peak demand and low solar / wind). Again, depressing how economically nonsensical this all is for a supposedly scientifically grounded effort.

Anyways, rational heads (and economic forces) tend to prevail. I think we will see more TOU rates, and ideally this will at least create some market forces around storage.

> Thanks for the site: it's a good tool to demonstrate just how unfeasible energy storage really is.

Turns out even good tools can give bad results if intentionally used in bad faith.

If you include a small amount of dispatch to represent long distance transmission, biogas or hydro things change dramatically. Prices are for real finished projects, and are going down for wind, solar, and storage very rapidly.

10% Dispatch: https://model.energy/?results=99cee0624b3f3f84ed7fe4f03b968c...

5% Dispatch: https://model.energy/?results=50ab975942dbab37b25ef471759b4d...

2.5% Dispatch: https://model.energy/?results=524af6e91d482ff646b2a9fcbff5a1...

At 2.5% even using gas for dispatch would only add 10g of CO2 per kWh to the total. Well within the error margins of estimates from various low carbon sources and significantly less than taking a year longer to build out low carbon generation.

Restricting scope to subsets of the country:

PNW with no offshore wind because it has the worse renewable resources:

15% dispatch + imports and 9hr storage: https://model.energy/?results=a72cdef1b55cc6a27ce7b9ba9c534e...

West virginia is similar: https://model.energy/?results=adcdcd3d6e54c0c80b0bb39ebe75c5...

California with 5% dispatch: https://model.energy/?results=b3166c36c03318779a65aef9d2f482...

A little off-topic, but has anyone ever developed residential hydrogen production / storage solution? What's the smallest scale hydrogen storage avaliable?

Hydrogen is not very scale-sensitive. Many people would say it is not safe enough for residences.

> However, the world is also transitioning to Electric Vehicles, and most EV manufacturers are offering V2G (vehicle to grid) solutions, so millions of EVs can contribute

V2G is idiotic. It cost £10 for full-charge of Tesla in UK pre-ukraine. Half of that money is distribution cost, not energy cost. What will you earn from buying low, selling high in V2G? Let's be generous, say it's £5.

So the battery lasts 1500 cycles, you are going to make £7500. And the battery costs £17,000 to replace?

No-one will be damaging their expensive car battery to earn fraction of a dollar to earn pennies. For anyone to do this, it has to be 2x above break even.

> Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious.

You can extract anything from seawater, even gold.

"Using electrochemical methods, comparable to those used in electroplating, gold has actually been extracted from the ocean, but unfortunately the cost of the process is five times the value of the gold obtained."

“It's technically possible to extract lithium from seawater,” Cui says. “But it's all about cost. And currently it's too high.”

There's no need to be so aggressive. V2G would likely operate similar to Net Metering, which the UK (and many other countries) does have experience with: https://uk.renogy.com/blog/net-metering-for-home-solar-in-th...

According to one website that I found, the average residential electricity cost in the UK is $0.482/kWh. Simple math: 1500 cycles * 75kWh * $0.482/kWh = $54,225 in offset electric costs, which would more than cover the hypothetical battery replacement cost. It is well above the 2x break even that you requested.

However, I expect most people do not have electric bills that high, so those people would not allow that much of their battery to be used by the program, unless they were participating in this program for a very long time. They would be more than fairly compensated for whatever cycle life was used by the net metering program. Yes, I recognize that the electricity would have come from the grid at some previous point in time in most cases, so some adjustments would have to be made to the concept of Net Metering to make this a sensible proposal, but there are ways to make it work if you don't just declare that everyone is a bunch of idiots. Electricity is much more valuable to the grid at certain moments in time than others. ""Transmission costs"" are irrelevant when the grid needs more power. Any kind of V2G system would involve exporting power when the grid desperately requests it, not just at a random hours of the day when the grid doesn't even want it. Virtual distributed grid batteries are already being proven.[0] This solution can definitely be scaled up.

Also, that estimate of battery replacement cost is based on the battery magically having zero marginal value at the end of its lifecycle in your car, which is not at all how things work. A battery that people are unwilling to keep using in an EV will still have significant value if it is directly transplanted into a stationary storage application, but oftentimes, it is just a handful of cells that are causing balancing issues, so replacing those for a few dollars can restore a lot of missing capacity. Even after the battery is done in stationary storage, it will still have value in the highly concentrated resources which can easily be recycled into a new battery pack.

So, no, it would not cost that much to replace the battery. Even today, you could throw a used battery pack on eBay as a worst case scenario and get thousands of bucks for it, but in the future as more of these batteries are being cycled through the market, it will be more economically viable to have businesses built around making this as painless as possible.

If you consider V2G idiotic, then you're effectively asserting that any form of grid battery is idiotic because those have to work on very similar economics, and that is a strange position to hold when we have real world examples of grid batteries being profitable even today.

> Half of that money is distribution cost, not energy cost.

I also have no idea where you got the notion that UK electricity costs are 50% transmission fees. It is 3%.[1]

> You can extract anything from seawater, even gold.

I'm not saying seawater is absolutely the best available source of lithium, but some people claim to have proven real success with it.

"The researchers estimate that their system can extract 1 kg of lithium from seawater at a cost of $5 (Energy Environ. Sci. 2021, DOI: 10.1039/d1ee00354b). “Our process is quick, energy efficient, and scalable,” Lai says. “And the system runs continuously and is compact and easy to operate.”" https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/Can-seawat...

Using gold in your response the way you did seems intended to be an insult, which is completely unnecessary. I'm not proposing alchemy.

Maybe you know more than these researchers whose literal job is to know about lithium and seawater, and that's fine, but I have never claimed you can extract meaningful amounts of gold from seawater. It is infeasible. Lithium is far more common than gold, though, which makes a huge difference in the feasibility.

[0]: https://electrek.co/2022/09/02/tesla-virtual-power-plant-gro...

[1]: https://www.nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission/who-we...

> I also have no idea where you got the notion that UK electricity costs are 50% transmission fees. It is 3%.[1]

I expressed myself incorrectly - I meant that the various non-generation costs, like transmission, various middlemen and fees, etc. roughly double the cost of energy between powerplant selling it and it reaching my house.

> Maybe you know more than these researchers whose literal job is to know about lithium and seawater

I am just slightly jaded from seeing many research breakthroughs, especially in batteries, never make it to market, and only really consider something once there has been at least one commercial facility operating. My understanding is that I can't buy lithium from seawater at the moment.

> If you consider V2G idiotic, then you're effectively asserting that any form of grid battery is idiotic

On the contrary, I think if you are buying a used car battery on the cheap, cycling it optimally and you don't need an overpriced Tesla-authorised mechanic to fix it, the results should be much better. Safety is less of a concern too. Or you can buy Lithium iron phosphate.

I think people are very precious about their cars and have many worries about damaging the battery, some of them irrational. There are also logistical challenges, repair is harder, etc.

I think the economics you outlined are the very best-case scenario, with war in Ukraine causing energy crisis and assuming nearly free electricity avaliable to charge.

"Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious. But, various alternative chemistries are being explored which could help in different ways."

Lithium is abundant as far as its total share in the Earth's crust goes, but it is my impression that mineable concentrations are rather rare, unless you are willing to spend obscene amounts of energy on purification. That is why only a few countries in the world actually produce lithium commercially.

We have some reserves of lithium in Czechia, but they would only be economically mineable if the bulk price rose significantly (as in, ten times or so), plus the mining methods would introduce a lot of poisons into the environment. Mining is usually seriously dirty.

Until recently, there wasn’t much demand for lithium. That’s the main reason for limited mining, in my opinion.

The cost of lithium was 9% of the cost of a lithium ion battery cell according to one analyst last year. Battery packs cost more than just the sum of the cells.

If lithium rises in price, it will affect battery prices, but a 10x increase would “only” double the cost of the battery cells, and the packs would be slightly less affected than that.

Realistically, there should be plenty of lithium for less than that, but it takes time to ramp, and lithium mining does not have to be destructive. The mining can be as simple as evaporation ponds in the desert[0]. (You’ll need refining either way.)

https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-24-the-big-picture-lithium-...

What is the origin of the claim that lithium makes up 9% of the cost of a battery cell? Anode material is the majority of the cost, according to this: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

In reality it's 50% of the cost, so a 10X increase in input price would amount to a 5x increase in cost. Battery production has become a resource extraction problem.

https://www.newsweek.com/precious-metal-values-are-raising-b...

> In 2021, lithium comprised 9 percent of the cost of a battery cell. Nickel represented 12 percent of the cost. But for 2022, those numbers have risen to 13 percent and 21 percent, respectively.

I had just glanced at the Google summary, so I only saw the first part. Call it 13%, then.

It is not anywhere close to 50%. The cathode is made of more than just lithium. 50% is an incorrect interpretation of the graphic in the article you linked.

Great, so we have to solve shortages of lithium and nickel. Nickel's cost is also up ~3x over the past few years: https://ycharts.com/indicators/nickel_price#:~:text=Nickel%2....

My point remains: battery production has become a resource extraction problem. Even completely optimizing manufacturing to the point that it costs nothing would only reduce the cost of batteries by a quarter.

Which just shows that you don’t understand commodity pricing. If gold was as common and accessible as lithium, gold would be a lot cheaper.

What don't I understand? Ultimately price is determined by supply and demand. Gold's supply relative to its demand sets its price. If some massive load of goal was dumped on the market, we'd expect a downswing with increased supply and no commensurate increase in demand (although gold being bought by speculators might distort this).

We're seeing a big upswing in lithium demand, mostly for EVs. And supply isn't catching up leading to higher costs, which will in turn lead to higher prices and consequently lower demand. Unless greater supply is secured or demand is reduced, this increase in price is going to persist.

And tautologies will persist in being tautologies.

Higher prices will result in investment in increased production, shift of demand to lower-priced alternatives, and investment in alternatives. Increased investment results in cheaper and larger production of everything.

Unobtainable lithium is a strange choice of hill to die on.

Increased investment does indeed incentivize the exploitation of less accessible reserves that would not otherwise be profitable. But those higher prices have to be sustained to keep those additional operations profitable. If prices goes down, those mines close and diminished supply pushes prices back up to equilibrium.

It's not unobtainable lithium I'm worried of. It's difficult supplying 50x as much lithium over the next couple decades with no significantly increase prices.

> But those higher prices have to be sustained to keep those additional operations profitable.

That is not, in fact, the case. A higher price need persist only long enough to pay the capital cost of developing the resource. The millionth ton is routinely much cheaper to extract than the first ton.

And, of course, we don't need 50x lithium production in any case. That is your private fantasy. No, thank you, not buying.

If the predicate is that mining of a commodity cannot ever expand, the how is building new nuclear supposed to work? Where does the Uranium and Gadolinium for fuel rods come from?

> The mining can be as simple as evaporation ponds in the desert[0]. (You’ll need refining either way.

The OP you are replying to lives in Czechia, they are not blessed with optimal location. Most of the world isn't.

The optimal location is a paradox, it is a desert, At the same time it has to have abundance of water for extraction and evaporative pools. Very few locations have that. Extracting from non-optimal locations costs more.

like 4 people are trying to explain this to you, but you keep repeating the same thing

I'm pretty sure it has almost exclusively been one person that has been explaining, and they have received numerous rebuttals from other people, but okay.

And no, I did not suggest the person I was replying to should do this in Czechia. Every country doesn't need to mine every resource. Thanks for throwing in a strawman.

Look at the the lowest point of energy demand. That's base load. How big is it relative to the peak of energy demand? Depends on the season, but it's usually 70-80% of peak demand. So, the vast majority of energy demand is in fact base load. I'm really confused about why renewable proponents talk about base load all the time - it's really not relevant to decarbonization of the grid.

Intermittency of wind and solar aren't just daily: you also have longer-term periods of cloud weather blocking solar and lower wind speed hampering wind power. Actually running a majority renewable grid requires either hydroelectricity, or fossil fuels.

The majority of Germany's electricity comes from fossil fuels [1]. It's not a mostly renewable grid, occasionally supplemented by peaker plants. It's a majority fossil fuel grid supplemented by renewables. By comparison, here's France's electricity production [2]. One of these is a mostly decarbonized grid. The other is a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplemented by renewables here and there.

> However, the world is also transitioning to Electric Vehicles, and most EV manufacturers are offering V2G (vehicle to grid) solutions, so millions of EVs can contribute a portion of their battery capacity to the grid in the future, and the grid can compensate them for their contribution.

This is an idea that no sane grid operator would ever accept. First of all, most of these vehicles actually lose energy in cold weather [3]. And if people leave to go on vacation, then we have blackouts because our energy storage solution drove away for a week? No to mention, plenty of people drive their cars around during the day doing chores or work and charge them at night. Those people are going to be a net drain on the grid.

> Lithium is not exactly rare or hard to extract, you can even extract lithium from saltwater, so this argument seems specious. But, various chemistries are being explored.

The market demonstrates otherwise. At the end of the day, if there's a shortage of lithium and the price goes it up it doesn't really matter what people are writing on tech forums.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:F...

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34120237

> Look at the the lowest point of energy demand. That's base load. How big is it relative to the peak of energy demand? Depends on the season, but it's usually 70-80% of peak demand. So, the vast majority of energy demand is in fact base load. I'm really confused about why renewable proponents talk about base load all the time - it's really not relevant to decarbonization of the grid.

I think this is just a confusion of terminology. What "renewable proponents" are talking about is baseload power plants. To quote the Wikipedia article that you linked to:

"Power plants that do not change their power output quickly, such as large coal or nuclear plants, are generally called baseload power plants."

If you've been missing that key piece of terminology, I can see the source of the confusion. People just call this "base load" to be short, for various reasons. You can criticize this if you want to, but that is what is happening.

> The majority of Germany's electricity comes from fossil fuels [1]. It's not a mostly renewable grid, occasionally supplemented by peaker plants. It's a majority fossil fuel grid supplemented by renewables. By comparison, here's France's electricity production [2]. One of these is a mostly decarbonized grid. The other is a primarily fossil fuel grid, supplemented by renewables here and there.

This has nothing to do with my previous comment. I have no idea what point you're trying to get at.

> This is an idea that no sane grid operator would ever accept. First of all, most of these vehicles actually lose energy in cold weather [3].

You're really confused about a lot of things in this part of the discussion. EVs have less range in winter because more of the energy is being used to heat the cabin, and that was done with resisitive heating until recently (more vehicles are starting to use heat pumps). The grid operator would not be insane, except from the point of view of a very traditionalist grid operator. The future is dynamic.

> The market demonstrates otherwise.

It really doesn't? The market demonstrates that demand has risen sharply, and it will take time for production to catch up. Every demand spike results in a "shortage".

> EVs have less range in winter because more of the energy is being used to heat the cabin, and that was done with resisitive heating until recently (more vehicles are starting to use heat pumps).

I thought it was this PLUS the fact that lithium batteries degrade quicker in freezing temps?

https://www.livescience.com/61334-batteries-die-cold-weather...

I agree cold has some effects on batteries, but the main impact on EV range is related to heating, so linking an article on EVs is not very useful when talking about stationary storage.

Batteries generate heat when charging and discharging, so grid batteries should naturally keep themselves warm, but maybe in extreme climates it would be worth adding some heat pumps to keep them in the optimal temperature range for longevity. It all depends on how the cost calculations work out, but it is not some major obstacle.

> Batteries generate heat when charging and discharging

/scratches head.

Huh? How do you explain why my iPhone drains so much quicker in the cold then, if it's able to heat itself from the discharge?

> but it is not some major obstacle.

Ignoring efficiency of battery consumption is a hilarious oversight. If it costs you energy ("lets just pump heat pumps on them") to keep an energy source from depleting faster, then you're still depleting energy faster because of said energy required to heat the thing. That's not trivial.

A tiny battery generates a very tiny amount of heat. Batteries have internal resistance, so charging and discharging is not perfectly efficient. Larger batteries generate much more heat by moving larger amounts of energy. Secondly, consider the relationship between volume and surface area. Volume grows to the power of 3, and area grows to the power of 2. A small battery naturally has a much lower ratio of volume to surface area than a big battery. With a higher ratio, it takes a lot longer for the heat to be lost to the cold because of how heat transfer works, and that's in addition to the larger batteries generating much more total heat energy. Thirdly, consider that the goal of an iPhone is to use as little power as possible so that your battery lasts as long as possible, which also means generating as little heat as possible. A grid battery does not have that same goal.

It is not a "hilarious oversight". Heat pumps are incredibly efficient these days even in very cold weather and there are ways to mitigate the heat loss, such as insulation. Grid scale battery deployments up to this point are typically already done in small structures, so the batteries aren't just sitting out directly in the elements. Obviously it's better if you don't have to do anything at all, but it is a very legitimate option. Every system will have some losses, no matter what. A very efficient heat pump could result in less losses than relying on the batteries to resistively heat themselves in extreme cold.

Just because it wouldn't work for a phone has nothing to do with how it would work for a grid battery, since scaling things up has a dramatic impact on efficiency for what we're discussing.

For how condescending your comment seemed to be, you seem to be missing a lot of basic points. Please give people the benefit of the doubt. I didn't come here to be a jerk to anyone, I was trying to help people understand things they seemed to be missing, but HN got super toxic over this topic. Some of this stuff is very nuanced and difficult to explain, which means that some people have no patience for it. If I'm wrong about things, or make a mistake in my explanation, I'm always happy to learn, but your comment was not attempting to teach anything.

Why are you talking about grid batteries when I was talking about EV batteries?

"base load power plant" is a meaningless term. Base load is a feature of energy demand. Power plants produce energy, the same power plant might serve peak load, base load, or both.

EVs are not a solution to energy storage. Even ignoring the challenge of getting people to hook their cars up to the grid, the battery production figures aren't remotely close to what we need.

People have been assuming that battery cost will continue to decline exponentially. We'll need a century to provision just 18 hours of battery storage at current rates. Renewable activists hand wave this saying that battery production will increase a hundred fold. In reality, prices are rising: https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-....

> People have been assuming that battery cost will continue to decline exponentially.

I think the incredible success of the transistor industry has created some very unrealistic expectations about the pace of technological advance more generally. I know this is a fallacy I used to fall for. If a pocket sized computer today can beat out a supercomputer the size of a small building from when I was a kid, anything seems possible. But in reality, the rapid miniaturization of transistors is an extraordinary outlier.

> We'll need a century to provision just 18 hours of battery storage at current rates.

That's a weird way of spelling enough batteries were produced in 2022 alone (about 760GWh) to replace the entire world's nuclear fleet with a renewable mix with minimal overprovision, more flexibility to meet peak demand and a lower forced outage rate.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

> Renewable activists hand wave this saying that battery production will increase a hundred fold. In reality, prices are rising: https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-....

And this has nothing to do with reserves and everything to do with extraction. The price spike of lithium was a combination of unpredicted demand and the supply dip from covid (because brine ponds take about 3 years to process).

Lithium will be irrelevant to grid storage anyway. There are already two GW scale sodium ion factories running and the supply chain CATL is building will completely dwarf them as it is much larger and compatable with the TWh/yr of existing lithium cell production and packaging facilities.

"Base load" is just a description of how demand is behaving currently, its now high as we are using fossils unsustainably and keeping intra day price variations artificially low. It can dip much lower and hourly pricing and spot market means the usage adapts to production without blackouts. (this also makes storage profitable to build where needed)